Professor Tom Cooney:

Yes, and in proportion to the number of people with disability, we are way behind every other country.

I would like to come back on one or two things regarding comments that Deputy Tully raised. If one takes Mr. Hennessy's situation - and he and I know each other quite well - he has a disability and he cannot get a grant to employ somebody without a disability, whereas if he was somebody without a disability employing somebody with a disability, he could get a grant. He needs support regarding driving or carrying equipment and he cannot get any support to hire a person to do that. If it was the other way around, he would have no problem getting support. That is one of the anomalies that exists.

On the other point the Deputy made, she is quite right that the environment is probably best now. The Covid-19 pandemic taught us that remote working is possible and assistive technologies have never been better.

Some might discriminate against those with a disability in business, but if the latter are in the background because they are working from home, their disabilities are invisible. Also, there are no issues with access to work and there is flexibility with hospital appointments and medical issues. All of this is now possible but the difficulty is that some people who start up a business need to step away for a while for health reasons, meaning they have no income and cannot get back into the welfare benefits system. This comes back to the point I made about the binary system whereby one must be either working or not working. People move along a line in that they sometimes can work and sometimes cannot, but if they step off the line, they are lost. The welfare benefit trap is without doubt the single biggest barrier to self-employment for people with a disability and, arguably, to employment under others. This is the main issue we need to address but there are others also, including that of relevant enterprise supports.